The main animals I get are breeding pair of dogs (Just one, dogplosions), breeding pair of cats, and turkey gobblers and hens.
For the items, I don't get a lot of seeds (Which is a stupid thing to do).
For what I want to accomplish is actually surviving for the first Goblin siege. I've never undergone a siege yet.
My main problem with survival is alcohol. I live near a river and all, but water doesn't keep dwarves happy for long.
Okay, so I'll rather give you a few general tips rather than specific embark set-ups.
I'm with what Automa said, you should definitely keep a closer look over your food/booze pipeline. Remember you can use the Status Screen (z) to very easily check how your stocks are doing at every point in the game (you'll need a bookkeeper to have exact figures though, although that's hardly a need while your fort is still young).
If you're having a hard time with food/booze, it's worth bringing more with you at embark time. With experience and time, you'll get a feel for the minimum amount of stuff you need to take depending on the embark location, but in the mean time you don't need to put yourself in a worse spot than you need to, so just bring whatever amount makes you confident.
I would suggest bringing 5 to 9 seeds for every crop available. Also, be sure to disable cooking of plump helmets, as eating and brewing leaves a seed behind, while cooking doesn't.
Setting up a farm to produce all the food/booze you need is actually very easy. I like building 3x3 plots, as this way I can have multiple plots producing the same crop or change my mind and add more diversity on a whim, without having to build more plots. In the very beginning, you only really need a single 3x3 plot producing plump helmets all year round to feed your initial dwarves, but you do want to add more over time to keep up with the growing population and also the ability to grow different crops for various things.
Just keep checking how your doing with food/prepared meals and booze every once in a while and you'll soon be able by just looking at the pattern if you need to farm more stuff or to add more cooking/brewing jobs.
As for the rest of your embark points, you can actually free up more points by being clever with what you pick to bring.
Since you're embarking in a place with lots of wood, I suggest you go without a xbow and bolts. You can very easily produce those on site. I suggest you still bring 2 to 3 quivers though, as leather is not that plentiful a resource until the first caravan arrives or unless you opt to rely on hunting. Once your dwarves hit the land, just enable the bowier and woodcrafter jobs on a dwarf of your choice and make a couple wooden xbows and a few stacks of wooden bolts. You can very quickly set up a primitive metal industry to produce metal bolts and equipment if you really need to (chances are you wont, unless you need to face very aggressive wildlife).
Furthermore, you can save even more points by taking the cheaper cave spider silk thread/cloth/bags/ropes in place of the default pig tails equivalent.
I'd still bring 5 emergency logs from the embark screen (you never know).
As to surviving until the first siege hits, it shouldn't really be that hard if you focus on food/booze production and basic defense. Just pick a strategy you like (I suggest long corridor full o' traps leading to the inner fort or fortified wall perimeter with marksdwarves on top). You don't absolutely need to rush building defenses, or the military, in spite of everything else your fort needs, but you do want to keep in mind having some working defense is a goal you want to work towards as more migrants arrive.
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Topic: Suggested Embark-Items? (Read 2471 times)